A comprehensive agenda for CSR

How UK firm Bond Pearce LLP has embedded corporate-social responsibility into its operations, processes and working environment, including a description of its comprehensive environmental-management system.

By Paul Collins, Bond Pearce LLP

For the enlightened law firm, corporate-social responsibility (CSR) should represent an overreaching philosophy covering not only community, charitable and pro bono activities but also embracing the approach a business takes to the impact of its activities on the environment, its dealing with employees, its diversity policies, its relationship with its clients and suppliers, and its own corporate governance.

CSR should embrace the very ethos of a firm and reflect how it is perceived by its employees, clients and the marketplace.

For Bond Pearce, the essential ingredients of its CSR policy revolve around the marketplace, workplace, community and the environment. Our CSR credentials form an essential ingredient in enabling us to meet our clients’ expectations, retain staff and develop the business.

The firm is a limited liability partnership comprising 68 partners and 700 staff. CSR is managed by the Bond Pearce Board by committee. Each of our offices (Bristol, Plymouth, Exeter, Southampton and London) has a CSR group that meets on a monthly basis and submits six-monthly reports to the Board on CSR activities across the firm. At the end of the financial year a report is produced, outlining the firm’s CSR activities for the previous year.

CSR and the marketplace
As a partnership each partner is a key stakeholder in and owns the business. Partners are responsible for the success of the business and recognise that its success is dependent on our reputation in the marketplace and among our peers. Our reputation is determined by a mix of our ability as lawyers, our perception in the marketplace and our adherence to the highest professional and ethical standards. We have a strong commitment to an ethical approach to business practice and firmly believe that transparency is a key factor in our success.

CSR in the workplace
At Bond Pearce we recognise the need to reflect in our workforce the communities in which we work and practice. The firm is committed to improving the diversity of those who work for us. However, we realise that diversity is more than words in a policy; it is about building a culture and attitude which are positive about encouraging those with a real talent to work for us regardless of their gender, race, colour, ethnic origin, religion, age, disability, marital status or sexual orientation.

For many years we have had an equal-opportunities policy coupled with policies to prevent bullying and harassment. Bond Pearce’s policy is designed to ensure that its employees and those who apply to work for us are treated equally and fairly without regard to their gender, race, colour, ethnic origin, religion, age, disability, marital status or sexual orientation, or by reason of their working patterns or their care of dependants. This is fundamental to our business as we actively encourage all forms of flexible working with policies on job sharing, home working and a new flexible-working policy. Our policies on maternity leave, paternity leave and adoption leave provide the statutory minimum requirements or more.

However, we want and need to do more. First, we have developed a well thought through policy and the training to go with it. We are collecting from all our existing staff the confidential information that will enable the firm to monitor its progress and report publicly on it.

The firm has recently introduced a new flexible-working policy, which will give all its employees opportunities to work in ways which suit their lifestyles. The policy actively encourages employees to seek the best working patterns for them while balancing their wishes against the firm’s business needs to provide outstanding client service.

But as importantly – or perhaps more importantly – we are working in our communities and elsewhere to try and attract a wider range of applicants who want to work for us.

In our Southampton office we work actively with the local business in the community ‘leader’ organisation to foster relationships with minority community groups and encourage applications from them. We are working on building close relationships with local secondary schools to encourage pupils to raise their level of attainment and show that there are a variety of careers available in a law firm to meet their ambitions.

We recognise that the legal profession has had a poor record on diversity, but in a firm such as Bond Pearce, where 68 per cent of our own staff are female, as are 60 per cent of our solicitors, we have moved a long way in changing the perception of lawyers as white, middle-class, middle-aged men. We are determined to show that working at Bond Pearce is down to ability.

CSR and the community
Bond Pearce has a long and proud history of involvement in its local communities ranging from undertaking pro bono work, giving financial support to local charities and serving on various organisations and bodies on a voluntary basis.

Bond Pearce is now developing these activities into a more structured approach. It is a member of Business in the Community (BitC) and is working with BitC to develop initiatives and broaden its outlook. The objective is to work collaboratively with others to increase and leverage the greatest impact on disadvantaged communities.

The firm has a strong involvement in ProHelp (the pro bono arm of BitC) in the provision of free professional advice to deserving charitable causes. It is in the early stages of developing links with local schools and colleges offering services and support, which the schools and colleges themselves identify.

The links currently are with Regents Park School, Southampton; Stoke Demeral Community College, Plymouth; and St Luke’s High School, Exeter. A link with a Bristol school is also proposed.

The firm’s commitment to its community involvement is acknowledged in staff assessment and appraisal processes where time spent on these activities – for example, carrying out pro bono legal work – is taken into account as a worthwhile and positive contribution to an individual’s development.

CSR and the environment
Bond Pearce recognises that its business practices have environmental effects, directly and indirectly. We are committed to improving our environmental performance. This commitment forms an integral part of the steps we are taking to achieve our objectives and the way we do business.

Our senior partner, Victor Tettmar, is ultimately responsible for our environmental policy, its coordination and the evaluation of its performance. This is managed by the firm’s environment team. We seek to ensure that all our employees understand and implement our environmental policy through effective communication, action plans and achievements.

Our environmental policy objectives can be summarised as follows:

To integrate within our day-to-day business practices environmental considerations, establishing performance indicators, action plans and improvement targets;
To comply with all relevant environmental legislation;
To share our environmental knowledge with our clients and suppliers;
To reduce consumption of materials to promote re-use of materials and the use of recycled materials, and to encourage the recycling of waste in place of disposal;
To consider the environmental impact of the materials we purchase at all stages of their lifecycle and to adopt a sustainable procurement policy;
To reduce the environmental impacts of our transport use through the adoption of a green transport plan;
To conserve energy through efficient use;
To promote training and support to our employees to raise awareness of our environmental impacts and ensure the effectiveness of our environmental policy, and to make our contractors and suppliers aware of it; and
To implement our environmental policy through attainment of BS8555: Environmental Management Systems for SMEs and achieve demonstrable environmental improvements.

The environmental-management system
Bond Pearce is committed to improving its environmental performance and considers this to be an integral part of the way in which we do business. Why? The efficient use of resources makes sound business sense. Many of our clients are committed to sound environmental management and naturally expect their lawyers to share their values. Our staff see a great place to work as one that embraces the minimisation of environmental damage.

In July 2005, Bond Pearce launched an environmental management system (EMS) project with the support of the Plymouth Groundwork Trust. The project was piloted in the Plymouth Office through a 12-strong ‘green team’ comprising volunteers drawn from partners, associates, solicitors, secretaries, a librarian, IT and catering. An early decision was taken to pursue BS8555 rather than ISO14001 and the green team is currently finalising phase three (developing environmental-management programme) of the six-phase acorn approach to BS8555.

The work of the green team identified that Bond Pearce’s principal environmental impacts arise from travel, energy and waste. There has been considerable demand for improvements in environmental performance from staff, and progress on the EMS is requested by each of the staff representative groups at their quarterly meetings.

Bond Pearce leases its offices. Wherever possible, energy saving light bulbs have been installed. As offices have been refurbished, movement sensitive lighting has been introduced. Old electrical appliances are replaced with new, low energy appliances with energy saving settings introduced on all computers. Within the Plymouth Office the single largest source of energy consumption is the communal lifts. As this information has been communicated, more staff have chosen to walk up the four, five or six flights of stairs to their offices. In the next phase of BS8555 the facilities team will be meeting with other tenants of our properties and with our landlords to investigate other ways in which communal energy consumption can be reduced.

Since the launch of the EMS project all but one Bond Pearce office now has all waste streams segregated for recycling. Old vending machines, are being replaced with new machines which will use earthenware mugs (so no plastic cups), which are then washed in high-speed dishwasher settings overnight ready for reuse the following day. The new vending machines are to be stocked with products sourced through fair trade, wherever possible.

The kitchens in all offices are required to source all food from local sources and to choose seasonal food.

As the EMS project has developed, contact has been made with all suppliers to request copies of their own environmental policies and details of their environmental management systems. During the fitting out of our new Bristol office, all suppliers were required to demonstrate that they had environmental-management systems in place. Procurement decision making took into account the sustainability of goods and services.

The IT team has been heavily involved in evaluating the environmental performance of our electrical and electronic equipment, in making suggestions for measures to reduce energy consumption, in evaluating the performance of different types of recycled papers and inks, and in identifying default settings for printing to ensure that duplex printing is used wherever possible.

Finally, our Bristol office has a green travel plan. These will become features in each of our offices as the environmental programme develops.

In summary, the lessons learned by the green team in Plymouth as the BS8555 phases one to three have developed were used to introduce robust environmental practices into our new office in Bristol. Having now reached a stage where most of the baseline information is available, we have identified the tools for measuring future performance. Our objectives, targets and programme are now almost complete and the next stage is for Bond Pearce to implement phase four of BS8555: the implementation and operation of the EMS, which will be audited in late summer 2007, once any further challenges have been identified and addressed.

Paul Collins is an environmental law solicitor at UK firm Bond Pearce. He can be contacted at paul.d.collins@bondpearce.com